Home > Projects > remote.squatcom.com

My Mac mini is upstairs, connected to my stereo. I have speakers upstairs and downstairs, and I used to go upstairs every time I needed to change the volume. So I wanted to control iTunes from my PowerBook downstairs. After all, why spent twenty seconds going upstairs when I could spend twenty hours building a web interface?

The app has a simple interface inspired by Apple's Front Row. (It's designed to be viewed from across the room. The only thing I'm missing is the actual remote.)

You can access it yourself here:

• http://remote.squatcom.com

(You can see what's playing, but you can't use the controls from outside my network.)

Features

• Prominently displays:
  • song metadata (title, artist, album, rating)
  • player state (playing, paused, rewinding, etc.)
  • album artwork
• Automatically refreshes as each new song starts
• Spoken feedback as each command is executed
• Keyboard shortcuts for all commands (e.g. Control-P to Play/Pause, Control-5 to set volume to 5)
• Progress bar shows current position within the song
• Volume goes to 11! (Not pictured.)

The scripts themselves are simply Perl wrappers for AppleScript commands. The slightly tricky part is modifying your Apache config (httpd.conf) to allow these scripts to access iTunes. If you are interested, email me for the scripts and instructions. (I'll post them here if anyone expresses interest.)